Weird Wednesday: Mulholland Drive Never Confirms Which Half Is the Dream
Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch) begins with a car crash on the winding road of its title. The lone survivor, a woman in an evening gown who can’t remember who she is, hides in an empty apartment, and is found there by Betty Elms, a bright-eyed aspiring actress newly arrived in Los Angeles. Together they try to work out who the woman is, using the two clues she has: a large amount of cash and a small blue key. The film began life as a television pilot and never gives up the logic of one – threads open and don’t close, and then, well past the halfway point, the movie changes shape entirely. Weird Wednesday exists for exactly that kind of structure.
The Twist
When Rita – the name the amnesiac takes from a movie poster – opens the blue box that the key fits, Betty vanishes, and the film cuts to a different woman in the same bed: Diane Selwyn, a depressed, failed actress who looks like Betty and whose lover, Camilla Rhodes, looks like Rita. In this half, Camilla has left Diane for the film’s director, Diane has paid a hitman to have her killed, and the blue key is the signal that it’s done. Overwhelmed by guilt, she shoots herself. The most widely held reading is that everything before the box was Diane’s dream: a version of the same people in which she is talented, loved, and the one doing the rescuing.
The film never confirms it. Lynch declined to explain the film at all, and the story is built to survive several readings, including ones that reject the dream theory altogether. That resistance is what made it a critical landmark. It won Lynch the Best Director prize at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen) and an Oscar nomination for directing, and in a 2016 BBC Culture poll critics named it the greatest film of the 21st century. It’s also what makes the twist so weird: it isn’t a reveal that resolves the film, but one that rearranges it and then leaves you to put it back together. Everything in the first half looks different once you’ve seen Diane’s apartment, and a second viewing turns up the warnings it was already giving: the decomposing body found in that apartment, Rita’s fear, and the Club Silencio scene, where the host announces that there is no band and every performance is pre-recorded. That scene is the film telling you exactly what kind of movie it is.